Stones of Taurus
13 stones.
- Aventurine Opaque to lightly translucent green, sometimes peach, grey or blue, with a soft glitter from flecks of mica scattered through it. Aventurine's name comes from an accident. Venetian glassmakers spilled copper filings into a melt in the seventeenth century and got a glittering stone-like glass they called avventurina, by chance. The mineral was named after the imitation. Tradition took the glitter as a sign of fortune, and made aventurine the stone of the chance you have to take yourself. Put the aventurine in your hand. Say out loud the one thing you want and have not asked for. Then ask for it today.
- Chrysocolla Opaque blue-green to sky-blue, often mottled or veined with black, brown and rust-coloured host rock; chalky where it is soft, glassy where quartz has hardened it. Chrysocolla means gold-glue. Pliny knew it as the green copper substance goldsmiths used to solder gold, and the lapidaries kept the name long after the trade changed. Tradition made it a stone of the throat, for the thing that is true, has waited years, and still has to be said out loud without shouting. Hold the chrysocolla and say the sentence you have been avoiding, quietly, to the empty room. Then wash your hands and say it to the person.
- Chrysoprase Translucent apple-green to deep green, evenly coloured rather than banded, with a waxy rather than glassy shine. Pliny lists chrysoprasus among the green stones, and medieval Europe prized the Silesian material enough to line chapel walls with it. Its tradition is gentler than emerald's. Where emerald is the long vow, chrysoprase is recovery, and practice gives it to people coming out of a bad year, on the argument that green returns to ground that was burnt. Hold the chrysoprase and name one thing that is better now than it was a year ago. Say it aloud, even if it is small.
- Diamond Transparent and colourless at its finest, but also yellow, brown, grey and rarely pink, blue or green; the lustre is unlike any other stone, hard and oily-bright, throwing sharp flashes of spectral colour when it is cut. Adamas means unconquerable, and that is its whole old meaning. Pliny reports that it defeats the hammer and the anvil, and repeats the story that only goat's blood will break it. The lapidaries gave it invulnerability rather than romance: proof against poison and fear. Western tables put it under the Sun, Indian astrology under Venus. Its link with betrothal is modern, built largely by De Beers advertising from 1947. Put the diamond on. Name one decision you will not reverse, out loud, once. Take it off only when the decision has been carried out.
- Emerald Transparent to translucent deep green, almost always with visible internal fractures and inclusions; the trade calls that internal world the jardin, the garden. Pliny holds that no colour is more pleasing to the eye than the emerald's, and reports that gem-cutters rested their sight on one after fine work. From that comes its whole tradition: the stone of the long look and the patient love. Lapidaries gave it to lovers as a truth-teller, and said that it clouded when a vow was broken. Look at the emerald until your eyes rest. Then look up, name the promise you are still keeping, and go and keep it today.
- Green Tourmaline Transparent green, from pale grass through bottle to a dark olive, in three-sided prisms grooved lengthwise like its black sibling. Strongly dichroic: much darker looked at down the length of the crystal than across it. Tourmaline reached Europe in 1703, brought from Ceylon by Dutch traders, so it has no classical lore; the name comes from the Sinhala turamali, a word for mixed-coloured stones. Green and black are the same mineral family, and practice splits them cleanly. Where schorl is a boundary and keeps things out, verdelite is given to increase: the heart, the garden, the thing that is meant to get bigger. Put the green tourmaline in your pocket and spend one uninterrupted hour on the thing you want to grow. Not planning it — doing it.
- Iolite Transparent violet-blue, and famously two-faced: turn the stone and it shifts from blue to a smoky straw-yellow or almost nothing. That pleochroism is the whole character of it. Iolite has no ancient name; it was described in 1813 and called after the Greek for violet. You will read that Norse navigators used it to find the sun through cloud. Treat that carefully: the sagas mention a sunstone without saying what it was, and no iolite has been found in a Norse burial. The modern tradition is milder, a stone for keeping your bearings. Turn the stone slowly in a window until the blue goes pale. Ask yourself which of the two colours today has been, and answer.
- Jade Translucent to opaque. Jadeite runs from emerald green through lavender, white and orange; nephrite from creamy mutton-fat white through spinach green to near black. Two minerals answer to jade, jadeite and nephrite, and both are so tough that the ancients made axes and blades of them. That toughness is the whole of the tradition. Confucius, in the Book of Rites, reads the virtues of a good man in jade: its warmth, its evenness, the fact that it will break before it bends. Spanish sailors called it the stone of the flank, for colic. Put the jade on and leave it on. Each time you notice it today, finish the thing in front of you before starting another.
- Kunzite Transparent pink to lilac, palest at the edges. Strongly pleochroic: turn the crystal and the colour deepens along its length, then almost drains away. Kunzite is a young stone. George Kunz described it in 1902 from Pala in California, and everything said about it since has been said in a hundred years, not a thousand. The tradition that grew up is consistent: a stone for a heart that has taken a blow. Venus claims it for its colour and for the gentleness of its work. Hold it in your closed hand and name, out loud, the one person you are still angry with. Then put it in a dark drawer.
- Malachite Opaque green in concentric light and dark bands, silky where it has grown in rounded botryoidal masses; polished slices show rings, eyes and stripes. Pliny calls it molochitis, mallow-green, and writes that it was hung on children's cradles as a guard against danger; that is the oldest protective use we have for it. Egypt ground it for green eye-paint, which we now know was a poor idea. Its banded eyes made malachite the tradition's watcher, a stone held to see trouble coming. Set the malachite by the door you come home through. Look at its rings once, and leave whatever the day did outside.
- Morganite Transparent pale pink to peach or salmon, the colour often faint enough that stones are cut deep to hold it. Morganite is pink beryl, named in 1911 by the gemmologist George Kunz for the banker J. P. Morgan, whose mineral collection he had bought. It is the youngest stone in this part of the library, and its tradition is correspondingly plain: the clarity of the beryl family turned towards tenderness. Practice gives it for patience with people, including yourself. Touch the morganite and think of whoever is annoying you most. Give them one more chance than you meant to give.
- Rhodonite Opaque to slightly translucent rose-pink to red, nearly always webbed and patched with black manganese oxide. Rhodonite is rose-pink shot through with black, and the tradition never separates the two. This is the stone of love that has been damaged and is being kept anyway. Russia mined it as orlets and cut it for the imperial court. Practice gives it after a betrayal or a family falling-out, and to anyone who must forgive without pretending nothing happened. Hold the rhodonite and trace one black vein with your thumb. Name the harm honestly. Then name one thing you will still do for them.
- Rose Quartz Translucent and cloudy rather than clear, in pale to dusky pink; the haze comes from microscopic fibres running through the quartz. Rose quartz has no ancient citation to lean on and does not need one; the folk line is unbroken and specific. It is the stone of ordinary affection rather than desire, of the love you already have and have stopped noticing. Practice gives it to the grieving and the newly alone as readily as to lovers, and that is the older use. Hold the rose quartz and think of one person you love and have not told. Send them a message now saying so.